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Tag Archives | car culture

A small group of friends chose to pay tribute to a buddy lost in a car accident by staging an impromptu multi-car burn-out on an Atlanta interstate, holding up who knows how much traffic so they can leave donuts of love and remembrance on the asphalt. Does Darwin drive stick or automatic? Looks like these guys may eventually find out.

Via the Guardian, Will Self argues for the symbolic, basic importance of walking as a force against corporate and state control:

Put bluntly: deprived of mechanized means of locomotion – the car, the bus, the train – and without the aid of technology, the majority of urbanites, who constitute the vast majority of Britons, neither know where they are, nor are capable of getting somewhere else under their own power.
Year on year, the number of journeys taken on foot declines – indeed, on current projections walking will have died out altogether as a means of transport by the middle of this century. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities.

Is this what will become of the highway? The Guardian dissects the bizarre spectacle of sold-out bus tours of outer London's very bland M25 motorway:

Long in tedium and inescapably circular, the M25 is not so much The Road to Hell, as Chris Rea once sang, but life itself. However, Britain's least loved motorway was almost beneficent on Monday when viewed from the seats of the first sell-out coach tour of the 117-mile London orbital.
There were several coach tours of the M25 in the 1980s and perhaps it is no coincidence that the 2012 version has proved so popular. The M25 was opened by Margaret Thatcher in 1986 and will endure as a monument to her era far longer than wars or broken unions. A visible symbol of individualism and the triumph of the car, the motorway was widened by the Blair government, building on the Iron Lady's legacy in every way.

Suppose Los Angeles were like Paris, New York, et cetera, with dense, narrow, two-lane streets rather than wide, barren five-lane ones? Artist David Yoon conducted a “fantasy urban makeover in photographs” to show exactly this. On Narrow Streets LA, click on (actual) shots of Japantown, Santa Monica, Downtown, Melrose Avenue (below, real on left and photoshopped on right), and tons of other locations to reveal the far more pleasing, charming, and inviting narrowed versions — a fantastical vision of the non-car-dominated Los Angeles that never was but could have been: